efore, never obtains its object,
however much it may obtain the woman; for the object of mediaeval love,
as of mediaeval religious mysticism, is not one particular act or series
of acts, but is its own exercise, of which the various incidents of the
drama between man and woman are merely so many results. It has not its
definite stages, like the love of the men of classical Antiquity or the
heroic time of the North: its stages of seeking, obtaining, cherishing,
guarding; it is always at the same point, always in the same condition
of half-religious, half-courtier-like adoration, whether it be
triumphantly successful or sighingly despairing. The man and the
woman--or rather, I should say, the knight and the lady, for mediaeval
love is an aristocratic privilege, and the love of lower folk is not a
theme for song--the knight and the lady, therefore, seem always, however
knit together by habit, nay, by inextricable meshes of guilt, somehow at
the same distance from one another. Once they have seen and loved each
other, their passion burns on always evenly, burns on (at least
theoretically) to all eternity. It seems almost as if the woman were a
mere shrine, a mysterious receptacle of the ineffable, a grail cup, a
consecrated wafer, but not the ineffable itself. For there is always in
mediaeval love, however fleshly the incidents which it produces, a
certain Platonic element; that is to say, a craving for, a pursuit of,
something which is an abstraction; an abstraction impossible to define
in its constant shifting and shimmering, and which seems at one moment a
social standard, a religious ideal, or both, and which merges for ever
in the dazzling, vague sheen of the Eternal Feminine. Hence, one of the
most distinctive features of mediaeval love, an extraordinary sameness of
intonation, making it difficult to distinguish between the _bona fide_
passion for which a man risks life and honour, and the mere
conventional gallantry of the knight who sticks a lady's glove on his
helmet as a compliment to her rank; nay, between the impure adoration of
an adulterous lamia like Yseult, and the mystical adoration of a
glorified Mother of God; for both are women, both are ladies, and
therefore the greatest poet of the early Middle Ages, Gottfried von
Strassburg, sings them both with the same religious respect, and the
same hysterical rapture. This mediaeval love is furthermore a
deliberately expected, sought-for, and received necessity in a